Is Your Website Optimized For Conversion?

There is a lot of talk about how difficult it is to get good quality traffic to your sites but few people talk about what to do with that traffic once it hits your landing page.

It seems crazy but it’s the truth, people have become so blinded by traffic that they forget to make sure their website is setup to convert. This means they spend a fortune in both time and money driving traffic to poorly optimized landing pages that never fulfill their earning potential.

Today’s post is a thought-provoking one. In this post, I’m going to throw you a few questions about your landing page. You may call it a checklist. I hope it can give you an insight into how well your landing page is optimized for conversion.

1) Is Your Landing Page ‘Scannable’?

Eye tracking studies have shown that there is a set way that the majority of people use to read webpages. Generally they start at the top left corner and slowly scan through the page picking out the key things that interest them.

This means using a combination of short paragraphs, bullet points, bolding, colors, etc to get attention to the things that need attention and to make it easy for people to read what you have to say. Just make sure you don’t overdo it as trying to make too much stand out will end up with none of it getting any attention.

2) How Soon Will Your Visitors Get The Answer Of ‘What’s In It For Me?’?

When someone lands on your website the first thing they will ask is ‘what’s in it for me?’ If you introduce yourself rather than addressing this right at the beginning, people will not read more than a few words before leaving your site.

So, always start off by telling the visitor what they have to gain if they continue reading and use lots of ‘you’ focused language throughout the page to relate everything to them individually.

3) How Fast Can You Make Your Visitors Trust You?

Once you’ve gained your visitors’ interests, the next immediate challenge is trust. The faster you can gain their trust, the higher the chance that they will read your entire landing page.

Many things can affect how fast you can build trust. They include the design of your website (does it look like a scam site or a trust-worthy site), the use of testimonials, the use of external recognitions such as awards, 3rd party site ranking etc, and having your own photo on the landing page.

4) Is Your Copywriting ‘Hypnotic’?

Copywriting is an important element in traffic conversion. You’ll be surprised that certain words can chase people away from your site while certain words can get people to take action. Also, you have to vary the usage of words so as to appeal to different modalities, namely kinesthetic, visual and auditory. For example, ‘imagine this…’, ‘can you see what I mean…’ and ‘listen to me…’ all have different impact on different modalities of people.

5) Do Your Visitors Know Exactly What They Are Expected To Do Next?

Many websites and landing pages fail simply because they do not tell the visitor what to do next. If your visitor reaches the end of the page and there is no link or instruction on what you want them to do next they will most likely leave your website.

If you want people to stay on your website then give them a link to another article that might interest them. The only time you may want them to leave is to take the desired action (e.g. visit the product you are promoting or opt-in to your list), but even in this case you still need a clear link that tells them what to do next!

Traffic conversion is an important skill that every internet marketer must master. I remembered when I first started, I spent more than $2000 on a course on traffic conversion. The good thing about traffic conversion courses is that you can apply the strategies immediately and you can see the benefit right away. I remembered applying just one strategy that turned one of my websites from 3 figures to 4 figures a month. Not a lot, but that’s just one strategy on one website!

If you would like to get a good course on traffic conversion, I suggest that you take a look at Conversion Rate Course by traffic conversion expert, Paul Bryant. It has everything you need to know, from sales funneling strategies to copywriting to real-life examples (which is lacking in many traffic conversion courses).

Share your thoughts

Yes, very few folks are aware about importance of building a sales funnel and effective conversion techniques. Traffic + Conversion = Online income. Fully agree that marketers should build a good landing page and sales funnel that converts well, then they can spend time and effort to drive targeted traffic :)

It’s so true. Just what is traffic without conversions? It’s really a meaningless metric. I come across tons of people spending lots of money on PPC and other traffic gen methods – and their landing pages are sucking their pockets dry because it converts poorly. Many amateurs just always think to use their Homepage as their landing page – and oftentimes this is a bad idea, because it is not focused on one simple action, but rather on several. It simply gives the visitor too many choices.

But for a good converting landing page design (especially when using PPC) you must minimize your visitors’ choices and focus it only on the specific action(s) you want them to take – not later on – not later today – but right now!

This is a big one! Landing pages are essential to have, whether you are promoting your own product, an affiliate product or your favorite program or whatever. If this is done properly as you’ve laid out here for us, it will make a huge difference in our promotional efforts.

This is a great post and I always strive to get to know my reader first, and letting them know how I can help them. As you brought out in the post this is very important to do. This is just one thing to do when optimizing your website.
~Mentor with a servant’s heart

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is quite important for any online business now, I’ve come across many sites which have nice traffics but the sales are very poor and the main reason for it is the points you mentioned above.

Without proper optimization of your site(s) with the common features mentioned above, the sales can’t be improved. This looks very simple but implementation is quite difficult but can be very advantageous.

As I was reading about the part where you said,When someone lands on your website the first thing they will ask is ‘what’s in it for me? I knew then I was in trouble. I am glad you brought that out. I will be changing my site. Let people know that I am their to help them.

Kenneth Thank you for starting LeadsLeap it has Proven time and time again that the one time offer is really worth it for less than $20 it works great for my lead generation thanks for posting all this great info on your blog Sincerely Robert